[rhombus]

Russians, whose lives are shorter and poorer than they were under communism...

This sounds familiar... oh yes, just like Iraq. I guess we never should have bothered with the cold war either. Why don't we all just become cheese-eating surrender monkeys.

[gridlock]

Looks like it is about time for the Russians to start making land grants to Germans again, so there will be somebody to farm the land productively. If I could get some of the family lands back in the Volga, I might go for it!

[brooklyn dave]

Now that the Orthodox Church has a free hand in things over there---what kind of weight does it carry in society in Russia?

[IamConservative]

Alcohol has to be a factor as well.

[TexasRepublic]

The aftershocks of communism may last for generations. If the Russians need a population with a positive outlook on life and high fertility rate, we could ship them at least 20 million wetbacks.

[2banana]

Russians, whose lives are shorter and poorer than they were under communism

Under the Soviets, much of the wealth of soviet satellite nations was shipped to mother Russia - You could find Romanian Brandy in Moscow but none in Romania...Mother Russia was always first on any distribution list - and that has gone away...

[livius]

They had an enormously high abortion rate under Communism, too. That is, those who weren't too drunk to even procreate.

[Truthsayer20]

Soviet communism was actually socially a pretty conservative society. For example, homosexuality was a criminal offence under Soviet law to the very of the Soviet Union. Western leftism is a different animal than Soviet communism.

[nutmeg]

Aug. 23 (Bloomberg) -- Russians, whose lives are shorter and poorer than they were under communism, have more abortions than births to avoid the costs of raising children, according to the country's highest-ranking obstetrician.

*Barf Alert* on this one...

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